


Exploded View

by nivo



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 20:38:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 640
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9202181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nivo/pseuds/nivo
Summary: Say you're the weird kid in a town too sleepy to get particularly worked up over a sore thumb.Say you're born at the end of an era.





	

Say you're the weird kid in a town too sleepy to get particularly worked up over a sore thumb. It takes note of your peculiarities, watches over you as you drag your chubby little body through the unforgiving positions of ballet, knows that the stars in your eyes you have for your pretty friend are that of admiration and nothing else. You don't want to kiss the girl, but you want her to teach you how to soar. You seek to reach an ideal out of this world; you seek perfection. Your sleepy hometown knows this, and accepts it with the mystified shrug of a good-natured grandparent. Loving, but too set in its ways to keep up with young people and their foolish notions.

 

Say you're born at the end of an era. You take your first steps in the dust and rubble of a crumbling empire. It would be so easy to stumble right then, to never rise above the noise and desolation of the streets. To inherit your father's vegetable stand and his drinking problem. But you can skate. You can _skate_ and it's enough; enough to become a cog in a well-oiled machine.

 

You can dance and you can skate, and suddenly your weirdness is _art_. You're a _performer_ , and the girls you still don't want to kiss are blinded by the stage lights glancing off the ice and the sequins on your shirt. It doesn't matter how messy your hair gets and how hopeless you are at shopping for clothes, it doesn't matter how much of a fool you make of yourself in front of the cameras. Suddenly, you have the perfect excuse to explain away all the quirks which set you apart from your peers, even though you never asked for one. You're famous, and you never asked for that, either. You never asked for any of this. You're too lost in yourself to see what everyone else sees when they look at you.

 

You see yourself through a million eyes at once. You're a child with an adult's shrewd understanding of sexuality. You grow your hair out and use your temporary androgyny to your advantage, because that is what you _do_. You use _everything_ to your advantage. You devour the great classics for inspiration in between skating and more skating, always-and-forever skating; you've graduated from mere cog to automaton. You don't feel a thing, but luckily, no one can read your mind.

 

You feel, for the first time in years, completely and utterly transparent. An ocean away from home, you're no hapless idol. You're an outcast once again, a weirdo who can't for the life of him tell _r_ from _l_. People don't avoid you, they just don't go out of their way to get to know you. They make their assumptions quietly, ashamedly, to themselves, and the funny thing is, they are entirely right. You're weird and you don't want to kiss girls and you dance on ice wearing tights and sequins. You're precisely who they think you are; what so few understand back home is universally understood here, in a country where people are less likely to say it to your face. It's fine, because you don't care. You don't care what they think.

 

You've only ever cared about what people think. It's starting to become a problem. Automata are limited to a predetermined set of instructions, and you can already see the end of yours. It shouldn't bother you as much as it does. Every era has a beginning and an end – _you_ would know – and the end of yours is nigh upon you. But you just thought. You just _assumed_. That there would be something more to it.

 

You just want, for once in your life, to feel perfect.

 

You just want, for once in your perfection, to feel life.

 


End file.
